The New Cue #301 July 14: African Head Charge, The Bures Band, Keaton Henson, The Rodians, Blake Mills, Deeper, Drab Majesty, Yard Act, Gaz Coombes

"He led the charge for the weird..."

Hello there, nice to see you, thanks for opening this email and getting our Open Rate up, something I’d never heard of until 301 editions of The New Cue ago but now is something I don’t stop thinking about.

In today’s Recommender edition, we’ve got a stack of recommendations because we don’t want you to sue us even though we’d probably get away with it because we’ve got cheeky little innocent faces, plus Gaz Coombes tells us about how one of his recent singles came together and Keaton Henson picks a mindblower. Entry unto this magical place comes at a cost, though: it will set you back five pounds a month but set you forward in all other areas of your life. A whole heap of people will think you’re really cool, and we’ll also tell you that we love you a lot. Because we do. But only if you’re a paying subscriber. Here’s a playlist, great bunch of songs to click Subscribe Now to:

Enjoy the edition,

Ted, Niall and Chris

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The Story Behind The Song

How we birthed a classic

Gaz Coombes
Long Live The Strange (2022)

This week Gaz Coombes released a special version of his single Long Live The Strange, the jangly, rattling anthem from his fourth solo record Turn The Car Around. This reworking saw Coombes work with The Choir With No Name, a UK charity who run choirs across the country for homeless and marginalised people to come and sing, make friends and have a hot meal. Here’s the new version of the song:

Last year, Gaz told Niall about his inspiration for writing the song in the first place:

“I went to see a gig with my daughter when she was 13. It was in Oxford in mid-2020, the summer when things relaxed a little bit and it was an artist called Cavetown. All the kids are just nuts about him, he's really fascinating, really interesting songs and I'd always hear them coming out of [daughter] Tiger’s bedroom. It's good stuff, interesting production, probably all done in his bedroom and interesting little moves and sounds quite a big production at times, little hints of Elliott Smith in a lot of double-tracked vocals.

He was playing at the Bullingdon on Cowley Road so I took Tiger and some mates to see him play and it was just him and an acoustic. It was a difficult time, mid-2020, everything was a bit mad and up in the air and socially I think we were a bit all over the place. He started playing and I looked round the room and noticed that he seemed to have attracted this incredible room of people that were so mixed, there would be a middle-aged gay couple, young teenage girls, trans people in the audience, this whole array of different kinds of people and they were all singing along to him on an acoustic, he didn’t have a big band or anything, it was all very underplayed. It was just a gorgeous room of free and interesting people singing along and it really hit me, I was brought to tears at one point with the combination of his songs and lyrics at that point and everyone singing and it being mid-lockdown and everything was a bit crazy, it had a big impact on me. It’s what live performance and connecting with an audience is all about, connecting with an audience that consists of anybody and everybody, it’s fully inclusive.

I find it quite powerful, especially when you worry about your kids listening to shit music or vacuous nonsense that will only last a couple of years but it’s had some big moment on TikTok, which is fine, that’s the way it is, but because my girls are really into music, I know that’s not an area where it’s going to be creatively nourishing so to find a lad like Cavetown and for Tiger to be so into him, it was a cool and beautiful thing. It reminds me of when I was a teenager and I’d listen to an Inspiral Carpets record or something by the Wedding Present or Pixies and you go, ‘that’s mine, I’m part of that’. It’s great to see that still happening with teenagers. I was inspired by that for Long Live The Strange, it’s where a lot of the lyrics come from, in terms of ‘be yourself tonight, this is your night to be whoever you want to be’ and fuck it, long live the strange, and strange in the nicest sense of the word, we’re all weird in different ways.”

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